I’m moving blogs. Again. This time, it’s because I now have my own special hosted website – one that costs real money! You can find me at www.joshsunshine.me.uk. It’s a very original domain name, don’t you think? At the moment I’m still finding my WordPress.org legs – it’s the first time I’ve done this, remember – so there’s nothing too exciting there. Read the Hello World! post for more details.

At the time of writing, it’s 17 hours and 20 minutes until the Epic Mr Cheese Skiing Adventure Begins. You may have already noticed the well-suited temporary new header image (which actually shows Austria, where I’m going for the Adventure) and if not, look up to the top of the page, right now!

It’s a school ski trip to Alpendorf, Austria for a week with skiing all day everyday, Sunday-Thursday. We’re going by coach at 3:40 on Friday, leaving Eastbourne for Folkestone, where it’s onto the Eurotunnel for a while, when Calais all the way to the hotel in Alpendorf. All together it’s about a 14 hour trip, so I have my iPod and a pillow packed for the journey!

If there’s (free) wi-fi at the resort-type-place, I’ll blog each day about the adventures so far. If not, I’ll save posts as drafts then post them as one long ski trip novel when we get back on Saturday at about 12:30 pm.

I’ll be taking my camera, so watch this space for some snowy-white photos!

Oh, and for obvious reasons, don’t go expecting new MCSMS episodes for the next couple of weeks (unless you can tell me how to upload to YouTube from halfway up a mountain, that is). That’s Saturday 4th and Saturday 11th, for those calendar-worshipping people out there.

As you may have noticed (hard not to) Mr Cheese’s Random Ramblings will soon be redesigned. It’s only because I’m bored with it how it is. If you have any interesting ideas for a header image please feel free to comment, otherwise I’ll think of something and it may be very cheesey (see what I did there?). Come back at a later date to see the finished item!

Time for some annoyance. TinyURL has changed ever so slightly in the last week, meaning that custom urls (tinyurl.com/your-text-here) are no longer possible. So MCSMS has switched allegiance to bit.ly – and the same principle follows:

And for those who didn’t know about the TinyURL system, this means that Episode 10 is http://bit.ly/mcsms10 and so on. Episode 7.1 is http://bit.ly/mcsms7-1 and the Christmas episode is http://bit.ly/mcsms-xmas. There will be a short delay before every link works (I’m still in the process of creating them), but before long, MCSMS shortcuts will be back to normal.

After showing the grandparents Delicious Library’s iSight scanning feature, they set me on a mammoth of a task; they wanted me to set up a catalogue of all their books. And what a mammoth that was. A big, furry, brown, knock-your-door-down woolly mammoth. They have a three-part floor-to-ceiling bookcase with 18 total shelves, 6 shelves in the study and two bookcases in the bedroom, 8 total shelves. The shelves in the study and bedroom are stacked two deep on every shelf. As you can probably guess, this took quite a while, giving me some very extensive use of Delicious Library (Version 1). So what was it like?

Setting Up The Library

Getting the library to the point of being able to start the process was a doddle. Just open the app and there it was, ready to import all the books. I wanted to sort all the books by location, so I added a virtual shelf for each physical shelf in the house. This was very quick and easy to do, just clicking the “+” sign at the bottom of the Collections panel added each one.

Importing The Books

Importing the books was also simple, and even quite fun. The main way of importing is using the iSight camera (unless you already had a wired one, there’s no way to get one now – only built-ins available now) to scan the barcodes of the books. Any cynical readers out there will most definitely be saying to themselves right now, “That can’t possibly work for every single book”. And in some ways, you’re actually right. 97% of the barcodes I scanned did work, and Delicious picked up, from Amazon, what the book was from the scan. Another 2.9% of them didn’t actually have barcodes (they are my Grandparents, remember), or the barcodes were too old to still work on Amazon, or the books were American and so had different barcodes. The last 0.1% just refused to scan altogether. However, this last 3% was easy to import still because of the fact that you can search for a title, author, or ISBN number – which means that no book is impossible to import.

Organising The Library

Obviously there’s no point importing all those books without doing anything with them. I was planning on sorting by location, so I moved the books to their appropriate shelves by dragging. This was very intuitive. To be able to then sort by location later, all I had to do was select them, click in the Location In Building field and typing in the location – Study, Shelf 4, for example. There was also the option to add custom art – that is, the picture shown for the front cover of the book.

Sharing The Library

Seeing as they wanted the library to remember where all their books were, I needed to export the library to give it to them. This is where the disappointment came. There was only one option: to export as a .txt file. Even this was, to be honest, rubbish. It doesn’t get formatted and isn’t even set out logically. To get the library to them, I had to download the free trial of Library 2 so that I could export it to Excel. I was not happy about this.

Report Card

Set-Up – 5/5 Importing – 5/5 Organisation – 5/5 Exporting – 0/5

Overall – 15/20

Final Thoughts: Delicious Library is a great app, but it is let down on its one export feature. If I had the option, I’d get Version 2, but I don’t. I recommend you do though.

I’d just like to thank everyone who watched Episode 16 and managed to get the views up to 130 in just four days. To put this in perspective, Episode 1 hasn’t managed to get over 100 in just over four months. I can only assume that it’s because Episode 16 was placed onto the Boinx example page, grabbing views from everyone who goes to the page to buy iStopMotion. Here’s a little graph to prove my point; it shows Episodes 1, 16 and the Christmas Episode as a running total so you can see the amazing rate of growth of it.